Jason converted to Islam to marry, and divorced about nineteen months later. In 2019, he started his application to revert to his original faith.

Jason is not his real name. He asked that his identity be protected, and some details have been left out for that reason.

A decision made for love

Jason fell in love with someone who was Muslim, and they wanted to marry.

Malaysian law makes no provision for a marriage between a Muslim and a non-Muslim. For the marriage to happen, one of them would have to convert. Jason was so in love that he was willing to be the one, and he embraced Islam for the sake of the marriage.

He did not know then what he was getting himself into. Not long after the wedding, he realised that he and the person he had married could not see eye to eye. The marriage lasted about nineteen months before it ended in divorce.

Readers of Peter’s story will recognise the shape of what came next: a decision made for love, a marriage that did not last, and a religious status that remained long after the marriage ended.

The route he was told to take

After the divorce, Jason did what most people in his position do. He engaged a Syariah lawyer and followed the lawyer’s advice.

He was told that the way back to his original faith ran through the Syariah Court. In 2019, his application was filed. He was simply doing what he had been told the law required.

The words he was made to say

Jason still remembers his first appearance before the Syariah Court.

He recalls that the judge asked him to recite the shahadah – the declaration of faith by which a person enters Islam. Jason was offended. He told the judge that he was not a Muslim, and that he did not want to say it.

As Jason recalls it, the judge’s response was that if he did not recite the shahadah, the court would not proceed with his case. The matter was postponed to another date.

Outside the courtroom, his lawyer told him that he would have to say it. It was the judge’s court, the lawyer said, and he had to follow the judge’s rules.

At his next appearance before the same judge, Jason recited the shahadah. He felt he had no other choice.

Seven years and counting

Since then, Jason has done everything that was asked of him. He has attended every court date and every counselling session with the Mufti’s department. He has complied with the procedure at every step, in the hope that it would end with the declaration he applied for.

His case was filed in 2019. It is now 2026, and it is still ongoing.

When I spoke to Jason, what came through most clearly was fatigue. Seven years is a long time to keep turning up for a process that has not yet given you an answer on the constitutional right he is seeking.

Entering Islam took a single declaration. Leaving it has so far taken seven years, with no end yet in sight.

A court for persons professing Islam

It is the moment in the courtroom that I keep returning to.

Under the Federal Constitution, the Syariah Courts have jurisdiction only over persons professing the religion of Islam. That limit is written into the Ninth Schedule itself.

Jason came before that court precisely to say that he does not profess Islam. He was there only because, by 2019, the civil courts had pointed converts wishing to be declared no longer Muslim to the Syariah Court. When asked to recite the shahadah, he declined and told the judge as much. The court’s response was not to weigh what he said, but to decline to hear him until he said otherwise.

One might argue that the judge was simply treating Jason as what the law, on paper, still considered him to be: a Muslim. But if that is right, the court’s authority over him never depended on anything he said, and there was no need for the shahadah at all.

If, on the other hand, the court needed him to say it before it could proceed, that is a quiet admission that his recorded status was not enough. In that case, a man who openly told the court he did not profess Islam arguably should not have been before it at all.

Either way, it is hard to see what legitimate purpose the requirement served. If anything, Jason’s refusal was the most honest evidence the court could have received on the very question it was asked to decide. It was met with an adjournment.

Words without free will

There is a further difficulty, and it comes from within the law the court itself applies.

The state enactments on conversion – section 96 of the Perak enactment, for example – require the shahadah to be uttered of the person’s own free will. That is what makes a conversion valid.

The statutory definitions of who counts as a Muslim follow the same logic. The Administration of Islamic Law (Federal Territories) Act 1993, for instance, treats a person as Muslim on the strength of his own statement only where it was made “in circumstances in which he was not obliged by law to make the statement”.

Some will say it was only a few words, and that Jason should simply have said them and moved on. Eventually, he did. But that is exactly the point.

If the words carried no legal or religious weight, there was no reason to insist on them – other than to require submission as the price of being heard. If they were meant to carry weight, they were precisely the kind of compelled profession of faith that Article 11 of the Federal Constitution exist to guard against.

His court, his rules

It is also worth pausing on what Jason was told outside the courtroom: that it was the judge’s court, and he had to follow the judge’s rules.

I do not doubt that his lawyer was being practical. Both of them would have to appear before the same judge again. But a court is bound by law, not by the personal rules of whoever presides over it. Which provision, one may ask, requires an applicant to recite the shahadah before his application to leave Islam can be heard?

That compliance seemed the safer course than objection says a great deal about how much of this process runs on practice and discretion rather than published procedure. It is a thread that runs through each of the stories shared here. The path an applicant walks is shaped as much by the advice they happen to receive, and the judge they happen to stand before, as by anything written in law.

Questions that ought to be answered

If the Syariah Courts’ authority extends only to persons professing Islam, on what basis can a court require a man who says he does not profess Islam to recite the shahadah before it will hear him?

If the law itself says a declaration of faith counts only when it is made freely, what is a declaration made under the threat of an adjournment?

If an applicant attends every hearing and every counselling session for seven years, at what point does the process owe him a decision?

None of this is a criticism of Islam, of the shahadah, or of those who recite it sincerely. If anything, it is the opposite. A declaration that means as much as the shahadah does to those who believe it deserves better than to be extracted from someone who does not, as the price of being heard.

Jason is still waiting. He has done everything required of him so far – including the one thing he should never have been asked to do.